• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.10
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• pp.1254-1267
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• 2015

Recently, excessive installations of APs have caused WLAN interference, and many techniques have been suggested to solve this problem. The AP aggregation technique serves to reduce active APs by moving station connections to a certain AP. Since this technique forcibly moves station connections, the transmission performance of some stations may deteriorate. The AP transmit power control technique may cause station disconnection or deterioration of transmission performance when power is reduced under a certain level. The combination of these two techniques can reduce interference through AP aggregation and narrow the range of interferences further through detailed power adjustment. However, simply combining these techniques may decrease the probability of power adjustment after aggregation and increase station disconnections upon power control. As a result, improvement in performance may be insignificant. Hence, this study suggests a scheme to combine the AP aggregation and the AP transmit power control techniques in OpenFlow-based WLAN to ameliorate the disadvantages of each technique and to reduce interferences efficiently by performing aggregation for the purpose of increasing the probability of adjusting transmission power. Simulations reveal that the average transmission delay of the suggested scheme is reduced by as much as 12.8% compared to the aggregation scheme and by as much as 18.1% compared to the power control scheme. The packet loss rate due to interference is reduced by as much as 24.9% compared to the aggregation scheme and by as much as 46.7% compared to the power control scheme. In addition, the aggregation scheme and the power control scheme decrease the throughput of several stations as a side effect, but our scheme increases the total data throughput without decreasing the throughput of each station.